(Talk at the UH Maui College Drama Festival, April 26, 2013,
Maui, HI)

I come here in solidarity with you and your action of
staging the best of what you can offer to our various communities of Maui.

I come here in solidarity with you even as you prove to us
that learning a language and the culture that goes with that language is worth
your time.

I come here in solidarity with you even as you will show to
us that the language and culture of the Ilokano people in the island of Maui,
in the University of Hawaii Maui College, and in the state of Hawaii is worth
all our time, and that to remember what we are about to lose, and which we
ought not to lose, is an ethical obligation, and thus, non-negotiable.

For a language is always this: it is the home of the human
soul, and in the belief system of the Ilokano people, this human soul is four
and not one.

Language of any kind is never a tool.

It should not be regarded as a tool.

It is for this reason that I come to you today to become a
witness to this kind of work that you are doing to make it sure that the
Ilokano language will never go away, will never be swept under the rug, so to
say.

Our Hawaii demographics tells you one empirical fact: that
about one-fourth of the total state population now is Filipino, and of this
number, about 90 percent are Ilokanos and Ilokano-descended.

We are a huge number, indeed.

But we have not been able to plumb the power of that number.

We have not been able to understand that that number could
become a political force, or an energy that could be utilized to empower our
people, and to equip our communities with capacity-building skills.

We have not been able to realize full well that numbers
speak volumes, and those volumes could be turned into something better for our
people especially needing our attention and care, our assistance and help.
These are our people who are falling in the cracks, our people who are being
left behind.

Even as we praise our abilities to increase our population,
we do not yet fully know that this increase in population could be something
more than fertility, but fertility of the human imagination, of our creative
potential.

This is what we want to achieve in the offering of
alternative but mainstream course of your academic life such as these Ilokano
courses you are taking up at this time.

For when you get out of this University, you will realize
soon that you will need all these linguistic and cultural competency skills in
your work places.

Our people are in these workplaces.

Our people are in laboring it out in the world of work, and
our presence will affirm them.

We need to recognize what power we can share with each other
when we recognize each other.

Through this drama festival, we are able to demonstrate that
we mean business with our duty to do it right, to do what is right, for our
people, and for our communities.

(An excerpt of a talk
delivered at the 2012 Knights of Rizal Regional Conference in Honolulu)

The story of the Philippine State
draws its narrative energy from so many sources.

One of these sources is the quest
for statehood of at least four European kingdoms such as England, France,
Germany, and Spain.

It is a classic story of kings,
queens, and monarchs lording it over the public lives of people.

It is a classic story of people
coming together and putting an end to the excesses of these rulers claiming
‘authority from God’ even getting mandate from the god of their own making.

Once the people realized that this
kind of a life could not go on forever, the people revolted, called for a new
of life, and eventually put an end to the fairy tales of queens and princesses.

This is the 19th
century that gave rise to the state, away from the kingdom.

This is the same 19th
century that we were drawing our initial idea of what a state is all about.

Rizal, in his education in Europe,
got the last glimpse of the medieval world that produced these excesses.

But Rizal also came to see the
beginnings of a new political reality—the beginning of the state.

In light of this reality, we now
come to understand that the state, as the political instrument of public
governance, as a political apparatus, is a new invention.

As a new invention, it must answer
the questions of people, questions that are old, and questions that are new.

With the coming of the Americans,
we inaugurate another energy from which we draw the conception of a Philippine
state.

It is the energy of American
independence, declaring a separation from Mother England, the energy of the
fourth of July.

It is energy from a revolution,
from the loss of lives and limbs in order to reclaim liberty for an oppressed
people.

That is the classic American story
that would go to the Philippines, exported by well-meaning conquerors that were
once oppressed by English masters an ocean away.

The exportation of that idea of a
democracy gave rise to the Philippine state.

We see here therefore that long
road to the Philippine state, from the visions of a free Philippines at the
Malolos Congress of 1898 to the Commonwealth of 1936, with Quezon giving what
could be regarded as the State of the Nation report to the United States.

It could have been good, with the
Philippine Independence finally happening in 1946.

But we need to ask for more.

The seal of the United States
contains a phrase, not codified, but stands as one of the fundamental
principles of a federated country: “E pluribus unum.”

The phrase is simple: “Out of the
many, one.”

There is also a motto by one of
the cultural advocates of diversity in the United States, the American Council
on the Teaching of Foreign Languages that says about “many languages, one
voice.”

For those who knew what President
Ferdinand Marcos wanted done with his experiment about a New Society for all,
we have his “one country, one thought, one language”—of what purports to be his
Utopia for a new Philippines: “isang bansa, isang wika, isang diwa” (“one nation,
one language, one thought”).

Somewhere in time, when Ricardo
Nolasco was chair of the Commission on the Filipino Language, he pursued what
he called “maraming wika, isang bansa”—or many languages, one country.

And here comes Jose Rizal, with
his declaration, each time misused by rabid nationalists and equally rabid and
narrow-minded leftists: “And taong di magmahal sa sariling wika ay higit pa sa
hayop at malansang isda.” (“Those who do not love their own language are
likened to a rotten fish.”)

That declaration, coming from
purportedly from his poem written when he young, “Sa Aking mga Kababata” (“To
My Peers”), translates freely as “The person who does not love his own language
is worse than an animal, or a rotten fish.”

There are two problems here: one,
a misuse of this phrase when it refers to Tagalog/Pilipino/Filipino as the
national language, and two, an attribution of the same poem to Rizal as the
author when internal and external evidences point another as a possible author
and cannot be Rizal. In either way, we are using a wrong evidence to prop up an
idea that justifies the turning into the Philippines as a single-language
speaking country.

If we look at these examples, the
uncodified motto of the US clearly establishes a precedent for the American
conception of diversity and pluralism.

(An excerpt of a talk
delivered at the 2012 Knights of Rizal Regional Conference in Honolulu)

Of course, our American history
teaches us that somewhere along the way, between 1776 and today, we have substantially
failed to pursue this motto to its end.

The inequities—and there are a lot
of them—continues to haunt us in the United States of America.

But the haunting is a result of
not fulfilling and pursuing an ideal, or not having one.

There is an ideal—and the ideal
has remained as the force that drives the US into a continuing reassessment of
itself vis-à-vis its goal to achieve diversity and pluralism.

In the Philippines, with the
inauguration of the Marcosian idea of a New Society, as if that society being
flaunted was really new, with more promise than pursuit, with more rhetoric
than result, the statist notion of a ‘national language’ came about, a notion
carried over from a Commonwealth conception of an idealized ‘national
language’.

If we read the complete
proceedings of the 1934-1935 Constitutional Assembly, we see clearly the
machinations of leaders, the conspiracy of those in power in order to bring
about not a state marked by diversity and plurality but a state marked by
hegemony.

This hegemony is plain and simple
the handiwork of a cabal of impostors purporting to act in the name of a people
in order to unite them.

We might as well call the puppetry
of the grievous kind, with one hand swearing allegiance to everything American and
English, and the other declaring Tagalog as the basis of a national language,
even if the spirit of the 1935 Constitution had another thing in mind.

And the formula for that unity is
not the delivery of the public goods and services, but the delivery of a false
panacea of all the social ills of a country.

That panacea was simple—and meant
for those with the simple mind: if we had but one and only one language, we
would develop, we would go the route of progress, and we would be united.

That panacea is the concoction of
a ‘national language’ from a brew of formulas that are both passé,
unproductive, and ahistorically grounded.

Include here that that panacea is
at best culturally callous and insensitive, as it overlooked the fact that the
Philippines is a country of many nations, many peoples, many languages, and
many cultures.

So here we go.

The 1935 Constitution gave birth
to Tagalog as a national language.

The Marcos Constitution of 1974
gave birth to Pilipino.

And the Cory Aquino 1987 Constitution
gave birth to Filipino.

We have here three layers of
Constitutional deception that is codified, making us believe that indeed, the
way to progress is in the speaking of single language, making us believe that
Rizal was right in telling us that we need to love our own native language
otherwise, otherwise…

We have constitutional guarantees
that inaugurated monolingualism, monoculturalism, and homogenization.

We have constitutional guarantees
that paved the way to Tagalogization under the guise of one nation, one state, and
one country.

Of course, we are misquoting
Rizal.

Of course, we are interpreting his
intentions and his meaning out of context.

Rizal, we must remember, was
speaking in Spanish.

His thought was from Spanish.

His conception of the world was
from Spanish.

He was telling this thing to
himself, even as he was giving the same admonition to what he called his
“kababata” or his peers. Or so we think, if we continue to believe in the lie
that he wrote those lines in that poem wrongly attributed to him.

But we must remember that he was
Tagalog.

He should have spoken in Tagalog.

He should have thought from
Tagalog.

But he did not—or most of the
time, he did not.

Part of the proof is that when he
began writing his third novel, the Makamisa, he could only start it, with a
handful of pages, with a handful of chapters, but was practically left
unfinished.

Part of the reason was that he
realized he was incompetent in deploying his very own Tagalog language.

If his poem’s admonition is a
premonition to what he would become, that failure in finishing Makamisa is a
proof that indeed, we need to love our native language, the language in which
we are born into.